Shuna Ni
Assistant Professor
Department of Fire Protection Engineering
shunani@umd.edu

Ni’s expertise spans structural fire engineering, fire forensics, the fire safety of mass timber buildings, and the impact of fire on various built environments, including civil infrastructure and wildland-urban interface (WUI) communities.

The assistant professor currently focuses on studying the impacts of architectural finishes on fire patterns and investigating the effects of wind on fire dynamics within mass timber compartments. Her research extends to WUI fires, where her team is developing high-fidelity, CFD-based models to simulate structure burning in WUI communities and conducting projects related to WUI fire risk assessment. Ni is also engaged in a project that addresses fire safety in warehouse environments.

Peter Sunderland
Professor
Department of Fire Protection Engineering
pbs@umd.edu

Sunderland’s areas of expertise include combustion and fire safety, microgravity combustion, battery and vehicle fires, and diagnostics development.

Sunderland leads one and co-investigates two other experiments aboard the International Space Station (ISS): a burning rate emulator, how to design flames to reduce or eliminate the formation of soot, and eerie-blue “cool flames” that could one day improve the design of combustion engines. Because many processes that affect the behavior of systems on Earth (such as thermal convection, sedimentation, and buoyancy) are absent in microgravity, the unique microgravity environment on the ISS has many benefits for the study of combustion and thermal transport phenomena; the elimination of these variables allows phenomena of interest to be studied without gravitational interference.

Arnaud Trouvé
Professor and Chair
Department of Fire Protection Engineering
atrouve@umd.edu

Trouvé’s areas of expertise involve computational approaches to fire safety, including physics-based modeling and simulation of fire dynamics at flame scale, and data-driven forecasting of wildfire dynamics at regional scale.

Current projects include a USDA/Forest Service-funded effort to develop a reduced-order computational model to simulate flame spread in the wildland under various vegetation, meteorological, and topographic conditions. Projects also include a National Science Foundation-funded effort to extend the modeling capabilities of current wildfire spread models beyond the case of spread in the wildland to the case of spread from the wildland into an urban area (known as wildland-urban interface fires) and spread across an urban area. The model could be used as a community-level risk assessment tool for pre-event planning, targeted recommendations for fire risk reduction, and real-time fire simulations for incident response, including evacuation and firefighting activities.